Babylon 5: The Lost Tales

Or, Babylon 5, short-form style.

It's been around nine years since J. Michael "Joe" Straczynski's Babylon 5 left the airwaves, and while a few TV movies and would-be spin-offs materialized shortly after the end of the original series' run, there has always been talk about a new B5 project featuring the original characters. A theatrical film? New show? Miniseries? Whatever form it would take, Straczynski has always remained committed to his little sci-fi show that could.

Nowadays, Straczynski's become something of a name, not only as a comic book writer but also more recently as a Hollywood screenwriter. So it was perhaps via his name brand recognizability in the former area and his clout in the latter (not to mention the reportedly brisk DVD sales of anything B5 related) that Babylon 5: The Lost Tales finally came to be. A direct-to-DVD "original movie," according to the DVD cover art, The Lost Tales is actually two episodes running approximately 35 minutes each that revive key characters from the original series (and its short-lived sister series, Crusade) for new adventures -- and, hopefully for Warner Bros.' bottom line, a whole new run of lost tales that will sell just as well as the original series episodes have on disc.

The Lost Tales -- subtitled "Voices in the Dark" -- begins with a brand new, quite triumphant opening title sequence that evokes the many characters and alien races of Straczynski's universe. The Minbari! The Narn! The Centauri! And, yes, of course the Humans are here too. A new theme and overhauled CGI visuals also serve the title sequence well.

But then we get to the first "episode" within this tale, which deals with Tracy Scoggins' Elizabeth Lochley, the commander of the titular space station who has been promoted to colonel in the decade or so since we last saw her. While Scoggins hardly misses a beat in her characterization of the tough Lochley, our collective B5 hearts sag in these early moments when we see that Straczynski -- who writes and directs here -- has gone the cost-saving 300-style greenscreen route and shot many of his scenes without backgrounds, which of course were added later in post. Alas, these shots are generally not very well executed, and the effect is a bit embarrassing.

Still, it's B5, so the fans will throw themselves into it. (And, yes, this writer has followed the show through all of its incarnations over the years.) Lochley is meeting a Catholic priest at the station's docking chamber who she has summoned from Earth because of a unique and distinctly Babylon 5-esque problem: She has a crewmember who has become possessed by a demon, and she needs an exorcism performed. This is a B5 kind of situation because the show, when it first debuted back in 1993 and 1994, was surprising in its willingness to confront themes of religion, God, and faith head-on. We were so Star Trek dependent back then, us sci-fi TV fans, that the idea of religion existing in the future seemed positively&#Array; well, alien to most of us. And damned refreshing.

Unfortunately, the Lochley story here -- awkwardly constructed and amateurishly directed in its opening portion, before settling into a fairly decent groove -- just feels so small. This is the glorious return of Babylon 5? It almost seems instead like some fan-fiction story being played out at a sci-fi convention.

The next story sees the return of series star Bruce Boxleitner as John Sheridan, who managed to go from a captain in the military to, essentially, president of the whole freaking universe in the four years that he was on the original show. Here, he is returning to the station for a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Interstellar Alliance. Along the way, he encounters the mystical Galen (Peter Woodward, returning from Crusade), who warns Sheridan of a great threat to the human race that only he can stop. The only trick -- is Sheridan willing to take the life of an innocent today in order to save the lives of many innocents in the distant future?

This second tale doesn't feel quite as light as the first, perhaps because it is lucky enough to feature more exterior visual effects shots of spaceships and the such. Also, Boxleitner has always been such a natural as Sheridan, a likeable, cool kind of hero who we immediately root for, and he returns to the role here with aplomb. But still, as with the first segment, the overall experience has an air of being too slight. Could we not see more of the original characters? Couldn't Straczynski have given us a more epic story, or combined these two tales into one coherent thread? Is this really the best he could do?

Regardless, fans will enjoy this disc, and one hopes that it will sell well enough that Straczynski will be given the opportunity to make another Lost Tales -- hopefully one with more meat to it. He's already promised not to direct if another DTV movie is made, so that's a start. But in the meantime, "Voices in the Dark" is seriously in need of a megaphone -- or, at the very least, a nightlight.